Keeping website content up to date

Your site is built and it’s live! Congratulations! But that’s not the end; that is the beginning! Your website should be a living, growing gateway to your business. Your customers will expect this, and Google values sites that are regularly updated higher in its rankings. So how will you keep adding new content? We make it easy for you to do it yourself – but if you don’t have time, no problem, we have a variety of packages to help you out on an ongoing basis.

Content Updates – Timing is Important!

The #1 reason people who already have or had a website come to us for help is that they can’t easily and quickly make changes to their website. Simple things like changing the price of a product, or updating a product description, are difficult to do. Recently a small business contacted us because they had had a Xmas promotion and used their website designer to make all the changes to their site. Their designer had a habit of not responding – he was interested in building sites but not so much in keeping them up to date afterwards – and eventually put the promotion details on the site – in January!! Can you imagine how frustrating it is to have your own shop window but you can’t change anything in that window – and the company that can are not reliable?

The obvious solution is to give you access to make changes yourself. However, there are two main problems with this. First, people who are not tech-savvy worry that they might break their site. Second, they just don’t have time to learn how to do it and to check that everything works fine after each change.

Our approach to helping people who worry they might break their site is three-fold; a combination of design, education and protection.

Design

First, we make sure that the areas you need to access “behind the scenes” are clearly labelled in plain English.

Education

Second, you can opt to take our very cost effective training package where we sit down with you and show you step by step how to do it – during this session you will make an actual change yourself – and we’ll show you how you can see each change before the general public does, so that you can change back anything you don’t like. We’ll supply step by step videos that you can refer to whenever you want.

Protection

If you want, we will give you full access to everything behind the scenes on your site. It’s your site after all. However, that does mean you can do anything to your site, good or bad. Many people prefer to have limited access, for example giving you the chance to add and change words and pictures but not to delete pages completely. This means that if you do make a mistake – and let’s face it, we all make them now and again – it won’t be a catastrophic one. Furthermore, if you have staff who are updating your site we can limit their access according to what you want them to do. This approach gives you peace of mind and allows you to keep your site updated exactly when you want it to be.

Don’t have the time? Use our Managed Solution

If you don’t have the time or the desire to keep content updated yourself, we’ll do it for you! The usual approach is for you to send us the words and pictures you want added, and details of where you want it added, and we do the rest. If you want, we’ll even supply the content for you and add it – you don’t have to do a thing and you have a regularly updated site! Remember, keeping your site updated makes a big difference to where Google rank you – and that makes a big difference to whether potential customers find your site in the first place. Also, once people have found your site, why will they keep coming back to it? If it never changes they are unlikely to repeat visit.

Non-content updates

Your website is made up of your content and all the programs that go together to make your website work. Websites are rarely built by one program alone; usually there will be a combination of programs each with their own speciality (for example programs to allow your customers to contact you, to pay you, to view video on your site, to improve your ratings on search engines such as Google, and so on).

It is very important to keep every one of these programs up to date and to keep checking that they are all playing nicely with each other. It is very important because the easiest way for someone to hack, or break into, your site is by using vulnerabilities in out of date software. Don’t think that your site will not be targetted. It will. Read the article at the bottom of this page to learn how your site could be hacked just like one of the most famous hacks of recent times.

We offer a maintenance package that constantly monitors all the programs that are used on your website and ensures that they are kept up to date. You can choose to purchase this independently of, or in combination with, our managed content package.